Healthcare providers across the country were the first to receive the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine Monday, kicking off the most urgent mass vaccination campaign in decades.
Sandra Lindsay, a critical care nurse at Long Island Jewish Medical Center in Queens, New York, was one of the first people in the United States to receive the coronavirus vaccine Monday morning.
“I’m feeling well,” Lindsay said after receiving the vaccine. “I hope this marks the beginning of the end of a painful time in our history. I want to instill public confidence that the vaccine is safe. We’re in a pandemic, and so, we all need to do our part to put an end to the pandemic and to not give up so soon.”
At UPMC Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh, an acute care nurse practitioner who works in a surgical ICU was the first to receive the Pfizer vaccine that had arrived shortly before then at 9 a.m. Charmaine Pykosh, 67, was chosen after a vote by text with her coworkers, who all want to get the shots.
“I couldn’t sleep,” she said. “My heart was pounding.”
The hospital’s chief quality officer Tami Minnier administered the vaccine and called it “a huge honor,” having also administered shots to four other front-line healthcare workers at another hospital.
Rhode Island Hospital in Providence received 2,000 doses of the vaccine Monday morning, with another 1,000 expected to arrive Tuesday. Dr. Christian Arbelaez, Rhode Island Hospital’s attending physician and vice chairman of academic affairs and emergency medicine, was the first to be vaccinated.
“I want to ask you to please get the vaccine so you can keep yourself and your family healthy,” Arbelaez said. “We will stop the spread in our communities if you get vaccinated. The vaccine is not the virus … The vaccine is safe, that’s why I got it today.”
Over the weekend, the initial 2.9 million doses of the Pfizer vaccine left manufacturing plants and were distributed across the states. It comes in two shots to be taken 21 days apart. Administration officials at the Department of Health and Human Services will order the second round of 2.9 million doses to be shipped in time to administer the second shot to each person who received the first one.
“You want to make sure you get to a point where there is a rhythm and predictability on the quality of manufacturing and lots that are coming off [delivery trucks],” Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar told reporters Monday.
To date, more than 16.4 million infections and over 300,000 deaths due to COVID-19 have been confirmed in the U.S. Current case totals are undercounts, given the fact that many infections go undetected and undiagnosed.
Daily deaths from the coronavirus are higher now than they were during the surge in the spring. During that surge, the highest daily death toll was 2,752 on May 7. Deaths exceeded 3,100 both Wednesday and Thursday of last week. According to the COVID Tracking Project, the U.S. reached 100,000 COVID-19-related deaths on May 30 and 200,000 on Oct. 2. Experts are predicting a deadly winter.
Moderna’s vaccine is on track for emergency use authorization from the Food and Drug Administration before the end of the week, senior administration officials said Monday. Much like last Thursday’s daylong review process of the Pfizer vaccine ending with a vote in favor of authorization, the Moderna vaccine will be reviewed by the FDA’s panel of immunologists, epidemiologists, and public health experts Thursday. The Moderna vaccine has a good chance of winning the panel’s favor and the EUA by the following day, Azar said.
The chairmen of the U.S. bishop committees on doctrine and anti-abortion activities issued a statement on Monday emphasizing that getting vaccinated against COVID-19 should be seen by Catholics as “an act of love” and a “moral responsibility” despite its connections to abortion.
The Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines were involved in a commonly employed “confirmatory test” that relies on HEK293, a cell line derived from a human embryonic kidney cell from a fetus that was aborted in the 1970s. Because of this, some Catholics, including bishops, have expressed concerns about the ethics of getting the vaccine, with some calling for Catholics to “reject a vaccine which has been produced immorally.”
Despite that, the committees encouraged people to get the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines despite the connection given the “gravity of the current pandemic and the lack of availability of alternative vaccines.”
A strong majority of the public said it will get the coronavirus vaccine when it becomes available — however, a political divide remains between those who will get the vaccine and who will not.
A recent poll from ABC/Ipsos found that regarding the vaccine’s availability to the general public, more respondents said they wanted to wait before getting it themselves. Two in five respondents said that they would get the vaccine as soon as they were able to, and 44% said they will wait. Elderly respondents were more likely to say they would get the vaccine immediately, at 57%.
Only 15% of respondents said that they would never get the vaccine. Republicans were more likely to say that they would not get the vaccine, at more than one-quarter. Six percent of Democrats said they were more likely not to get the vaccine.
“Assuming that everything remains on track, we would hope and anticipate FDA action comparable to what we’ve seen in this last week with Pfizer,” Azar said Monday. “No guarantees, but we would certainly hope the comparable timeline.”
Five first responders in Washington, D.C., including the acting fire chief, the department’s medical director, and three firefighters, announced they will get the coronavirus vaccine on camera later this week in an effort to boost public confidence in the shots. Washington Mayor Muriel Bowser, who dubbed the volunteers the “First Five,” praised the volunteers Monday for sending “a strong message about the importance of this vaccine to protect them, their families and loved ones, their patients and coworkers, and our entire city.”
Lt. Keishea Jackson, one of the five first responders, said, “I’m getting vaccinated for my city … In the last nine months, I’ve seen COVID devastate my department. I’ve seen my brothers and sisters go into the hospital. I’ve seen them with severe symptoms — things we never thought we would see.”
A new variant of the coronavirus has been found in the United Kingdom.
“We have identified a new variant of coronavirus, which may be associated with the fastest spread in the southeast of England,” Health Secretary Matt Hancock told Parliament Monday. “Initial analysis suggests that this variant is growing faster than the existing variant.”
The U.K. has identified more than 1,000 cases of the variant strain in 60 different local health authorities.
However, Hancock said there was no reason to think that the variant strain would cause more severe cases of COVID-19 or that it would be resistant to vaccines.
The Catholic Archdiocese of Washington, D.C., is suing Bowser’s COVID-19 restrictions on in-church services. The district caps church attendance at 50 or 50% of capacity, whichever is less.
The archdiocese notes that the standard is different than the restrictions faced by businesses that are based solely on capacity. The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for D.C. last week, calls the city’s restrictions on religious institutions “arbitrary,” “illegal,” and “unscientific.”
New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio warned that the city should prepare to go into total shutdown, saying Monday that more restrictions should start “quite soon” as the city’s average test positivity rate remains above 5%. City health officials reported that the average positivity rate in the past seven days was around 5.5%, the highest test positivity rate average since late May.
“What is increasingly clear is that all forms of restrictions have to be on the table at this point,” de Blasio said. “At the current rate we are going, you have to be ready now for a full shutdown, a pause like we had back at the end of the spring.”
New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern announced that the country would create a travel bubble with Australia, meaning people could travel between countries without having to complete the mandatory 14-day quarantine, CNN reported. Both countries imposed strict travel restrictions in March, setting them up to be relatively successful at containing the coronavirus outbreak.
“I think, for now, New Zealanders by and large appreciate the approach of the government to ensure that we are not taking on unnecessary risk as we [are] going into summer and a much-needed summer break for New Zealanders,” Ardern said.
